CloudBees Finds a Sales Research Sidekick With EverString

Quality data – and its influence on revenue – is a key driver of any B2B organization, especially for marketing teams. That’s exactly why having brilliant, forward-thinking people like Dave Melillo on your team is continually crucial for future success. Dave is a marketing data scientist at CloudBees, a Jenkins® (open source automation server) and DevOps hub that delivers “white glove” solutions for software development and delivery.

Since he was a kid, Dave was always into coding. He started with simple tasks like using a terminal or a command line on his PC, but eventually got into more involved languages like JavaScript and Python. However, although he thought coding and data were interesting, he never really used them much professionally – until he started working at S&P Ratings. With so much financial data at his fingertips at that organization, he was able to roll up his sleeves and really make sense of data on a large scale.

Recognizing Game Changers Ahead of Time

However, as data became a central figure in operations across all industries over the years, Dave wanted the opportunity to make an even greater impact at a small company with his skills. CloudBees also presented Dave with the chance to work within an open source community and be part of that story, so joining their team was a no-brainer. “I imagine I’m kind of a geek by nature … so to have an opportunity, not only to be involved in developing an open source community and that tool, it’s really just a monolithic game changer,” Dave explained.

To have an opportunity, not only to be involved in developing an open source community and that tool, it’s really just a monolithic game changer.”

Although marketing data scientist is his official title, Dave really deals with the full end-to-end data process and wears a lot of hats. Needless to say, he is constantly learning and Dave is truly “a student of the game” in many ways. Being an avid sports fan, he loves looking at the analytics that drive sports teams to win. Whether it’s baseball or football, Dave discovers the numbers behind winning teams, which adds an extra layer of entertainment value for him as a data analyst.

Always looking forward, Dave is also a student in a literal sense as he took classes on machine learning at MIT through their edX program. If that isn’t enough, he also likes to read up about AI in his spare time and educate himself on the technologies that will likely have an impact on his industry and career in the near future. “I really think when human technology changes, we’re going to see a paradigm shift very close to the time when we all got smartphones,” Dave said, speaking about tech in the future. “We actually have a lot of technology – it’s the way we interface with it that’s very archaic at this point.” Dave went on to say that he looks to influencers like Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat. Like CloudBees, Snapchat also leans on data and analytics to inform much of its continued success. However, at the end of the day, leading by example is what really motivates Dave in his role.

“How much have I impacted? How well is my team doing when I’m out on the floor? I just try to show up, work hard, learn and improve every day, and I try to not ever look backward – that’s for retirement,” Dave said.

How EverString Became A Sidekick

Dave first found out about EverString through his Senior VP of Marketing. He was pretty honest about his skepticism with the platform – at first, anyway. “The last thing that I wanted to do was to look into any sort of tool that was going to tell me what to do,” Dave explained. However, it didn’t take long for Dave to see how EverString could become really useful not only for him as a data analyst, but across the entire organization at CloudBees.

“I’m telling you as soon as I got into EverString, I totally got it. And it’s been one of my sidekicks this whole year,” Dave explained. “I felt it made my life a whole lot better.” Dave went on to say that his team was considering building their own predictive solution, but even with their home-grown efforts, EverString still won out over it. “That’s the quality of the product.”

The fact that we could plug it in and get a score for our accounts immediately … that was a big win. EverString makes it so easy for us to do that accurately.”

At first, some of the biggest EverString benefits for CloudBees were centered around predictive scoring. “The fact that we could plug it in and get a score for our accounts immediately … that was a big win,” Dave said. “EverString makes it so easy for us to do that accurately.” Dave explained that because CloudBees is still in an emerging space, they need to know exactly which companies are hip to DevOps and other specific solutions, so having firmographics alongside deeper insights into their audience has made a big impact on CloudBees’ sales research efforts and productivity.

“Our inside sales team is like, 10 people. So for 10 people to go through 50,000 accounts is completely unrealistic … giving us a prioritized list of who we should be calling and why is just major,” Dave explained. “Then, that data goes out to the BDR team. It goes out to our CEO. It goes out to our product team so that they can understand the types of accounts going after new features. That information is critical to the rest of the components of our company.”

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